Thursday January 23, 2003

Elegant Coding

by Jay F. Davis, www.amazsoft.com

I've been struggling lately with finding a look and feel for my site that is both pleasing to the eye and elegant in its programming implementation. Elegance as a programming concept means simple yet powerful and, well, beautiful to behold. Yes, programming, like art, can be beautiful.

I think coding elegance can be facilitated in web site design by placing most or all of the formatting information into cascading style sheets (css) instead of in the body of the html. This also means using div tags and the float element of css to create floating html-style tables without table tags. Now that's elegant! (And simple and beautiful compared to tables and ugly html frames.)

I ran across links to a couple of very elegant site designs recently via scottandrew.com. Scott mentions clagnut and www.cinnamon.nl as especially elegant. I agree. I especially like the cinnamon site. This is the kind of elegance I look for when designing a web site.

For a pretty nice example of a site that I'm currently developing, see stpaulgrantpark.org. My friend Jacqui Gazi developed the design for this site. We still have lots of content to fill in, but the first impression is definitely pleasant. I'm doing the Daily Meditations for the site, by the way, in addition to most of the underlying coding and database work. But not much other than the initial page is done...